Strauss, sweetness and steel

Monday, 8 August 2016, 10:52 am
Article: Max Rashbrooke

Strauss – Four Last Songs
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Saturday, August 6
Reviewer: Max Rashbrooke

There was a diminished audience for this New Zealand Symphony Orchestra performance, a fact probably explicable by its clash with the Super Rugby final that evening, which was being played just down the road and which featured the (ultimately victorious) local team, the Hurricanes.

Perhaps appropriately, the NZSO’s own show was a performance of two halves. First up were Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, an exquisite collection of pieces that are notionally about death but which in fact reflect on the fullness of a life lived through love. The star of the piece was, unsurprisingly, German soprano Christiane Libor, who studied with the revered baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Fishcher-Dieskau once said of his fellow performer Fritz Wunderlich that his voice had "a bewitching sweetness combined with the necessary amount of steel", and the same could be applied to Libor. She sang beautifully right across her range, sounding strong and powerful in the lower reaches and delicate in the higher ones.

In particular the third song, Beim Schlafengehen (Time to Sleep), displayed her exceptional versatility. The NZSO's accompaniment was carefully judged throughout and contained moments of real beauty, especially the horn playing in the second song (September) and the strings in the third.

Sadly I didn't enjoy nearly as much the work in the second half, Mahler's Fourth Symphony. Conductor Edo Waart, as has been his habit with the NZSO so far this year, took it at a fairly brisk tempo from the outset; and while that helped with the musical coherence of a piece which jumps around a fair bit, it left too little space for the more beautiful moments to breathe.

Similarly some of the phrases that are supposed – I think – to express a childlike sense of wonder, as with the flutes in the first movement, became a little harsh and forced. There was still much to admire, and Libor's reappearance for the exquisite final movement was a thing of delight, but overall the serenity and peace typically associated with the piece didn't materialise, at least for this reviewer.

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Max Rashbrooke

Journalist

Max Rashbrooke is a journalist and author working in Wellington, New Zealand, where he writes about politics, finance and social issues.

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